He made twenty sound both a long way off and an extremely advanced age. I was around twice as many years past twenty as Xander still had to go to get there in the first place. It made me feel suddenly very old.
As I ended the call Trey hopped down from his railing. “So what did he say?” he demanded.
“Well, Gerri seems to be letting Whitmarsh do the talking for her but—”
“Not that!” he interrupted, scathing at my mistake. “About Scott! What did he say about Scott?”
“He’s out of surgery,” I said. Trey heard the ‘but’ in my voice and made an impatient, get-on-with-it movement with his hands. “There might be some doubt about how much mobility he’s going to regain.”
Trey stared at me for a moment with his mouth open. The misery spread across his face like a window cracking in slow motion. He slipped his hands into his pockets, hunching his shoulders forwards, and turned away from me.
I let him get halfway across the car park before I gave in and hurried after him. He didn’t want to look at me, wrenching away when I tried to catch hold of his arm. I tired of this game faster than he did. Eventually my temper frayed far enough for me to catch a flailing wrist and twist a lock onto it. The action brought him up short with a startled cry.
He turned a reproachful, tear-riven face in my direction, staining me with guilt. I pushed it aside.
“Stop it, Trey,” I said, snappy as he struggled ineffectually against the lock. “We don’t have time for self-pity. It’s a luxury we can’t afford. So Scott’s badly hurt. That’s terrible, but there’s nothing you can do to help him right now other than doing your best to get to the bottom of this. Giving in and throwing a wobbly makes a mockery of what he’s going through. It makes it all for nothing.”
He stilled and was quiet for several seconds. I could see his chest rising and falling as he took a couple of deep breaths to steady himself. Then he said, with a surprising dignity, “Would you let go of my arm, please?”
I complied instantly, ready to catch him again if he ran, but he didn’t move.
We stood like that for a time. Above us, the sky had taken on that dramatic pinky blue tinge as day fled into evening, leaving a masterpiece of shape and colour spread across the heavens. Below it, oblivious to the beauty unfolding overhead, traffic sped by along Atlantic Avenue.
It was only when a bright yellow drophead Mustang full of noisy kids turned in a touch too fast off the road and swung in our direction that we moved. Trey was docile now, allowing me to lead him across the road, jogging obediently alongside me through the gaps between the cars. The light was dropping more quickly and they all had their lights on. We walked down the nearest beach ramp and out onto the sand.
It was only then that the boy cleared his throat. “So,” he said, “what did it say?”
I didn’t need to ask what he was talking about, but I searched his face as if to check that he really wanted to know this time. There was no trace of sarcasm there.
I gave him the full report of what Xander had told me. When I was done he was quiet again, frowning. Henry’s duplicity, I considered, must have been hard for him to take. Trey was learning some tough lessons about trust lately.
“So if it was Mr Whitmarsh he was in contact with, how did that cop, like, get to hear about Henry?”
I shrugged. “I don’t know,” I admitted. “The only explanation that occurred to me was that perhaps they were working together.”
He stared. “But Lonnie killed that guy . . .”
I nodded. “I did say ‘
Trey was still frowning. “How did Mr Whitmarsh know right off that Henry was talking about me when he wanted proof he’d got a hold of me?” he said slowly. He looked up. “That was what he said, right? But if Dad’s disappeared too, how did they know Henry wasn’t talking about him?”
“My God, I think you’re right,” I murmured and found it was my turn to stare. I’d completely missed the significance of that but the more I thought about it, the more significant it became. Trey was quite right. Whitmarsh had assumed – no, more than that, he’d
So how could he have known?
He couldn’t. Not unless Keith was controlling this whole thing from behind the scenes. I did some mental shifting to see if that fitted and it did, after a fashion. But for what purpose?
“Did Xander say anything else?” Trey asked.
“Only that he’s grounded until he’s an old man, and that we can’t go back to Scott’s place.”
As the full consequences of that piece of news hit him Trey’s face grew mournful. “So that means . . .”
“Yeah.” I raised a tired smile and waved an arm to indicate the sands all around us. “Looks like we’re back to sleeping on the beach again.”
***
It was dark before we knew it, the inky blackness above us spangled with stars. It gave the sky an illusion of a boundary it didn’t have, dropping straight down into the sea at the far horizon.
We weren’t far away from the area where we’d slept out on that first night, near Walt and Harriet’s place. I suppose I needed time to get my head round the idea of asking for help, but first thing in the morning, I promised myself, we’d go and take Walt up on his offer. With any luck, another of Harriet’s breakfasts would be part of the deal.
We weren’t the only people who’d decided to spend a night out in the open air. The beach itself, as it had been last time, was crowded with kids, half of whom seemed to be courting couples. They grappled with each other in the shadows, tucked up under the walls of the apartment blocks and hotels that edged the seafront, intent on ingraining sand into the most uncomfortable places.
Every now and again we’d get a silvery moonlit flash of naked flesh as we moved past. It was hard to get an adolescent like Trey to concentrate on putting his feet one in front of the other and keep walking. As it was he was so busy ogling that he nearly tripped up twice.
“What d’you want to do?” I muttered eventually, “Give ‘em marks for style?”
“It’s all right for you,” he groused when we reached a quieter stretch. “I bet you’ve, like, done it loads of times.”
“‘Done it’?” I queried. He should have taken the stinging tone as a warning but he had a thicker skin than that.
“Yeah,” he ploughed on, discomfited but persistent. “Y’know – fucked.”
“I don’t ‘fuck’, as you so elegantly put it,” I bit back.
“No way!” Trey said. “Mr Whitmarsh said you were fucking Mr Meyer. He said—”
“Sean and I have slept together, yes, but that’s not the same thing,” I cut in, not wanting to hear Whitmarsh’s cruder description of what Sean and I had shared. Especially not now. I didn’t want to hear Trey talk about it, either. He didn’t even begin to have the right to bring up something so private.
“Why isn’t it?” Trey wanted to know and I suddenly realised why you heard so many parents answer awkward questions from their kids with the waspish phrase, “Because
Instead, I strapped down my irritation and made an attempt to explain. “Because just fucking somebody is very different from making love with them, where you have a bond, a connection. Fucking implies little more than an all-out, selfish, I’m-using-you-for-my-own-gratification kind of act.”
Trey was at an age where his squirm at the mention of the word “love” was almost a reflex action. Then he just shrugged. “Yeah – and your point is?”
The strap broke and my temper let fly. I rounded on him, almost unable to see his face for the starbursts going off inside my head. “You asked me once why I left the army. Well, shall I tell you why?” I threw at him, not waiting for an answer. “I left because four of the men I was training alongside, four of the men I was supposed to know and trust, got drunk one night and decided they were going to fuck me, regardless of what I thought about it.”
Trey tried to flinch away but I grabbed his arm and spun him back to face me, not letting him escape my bitter words. Some part of me knew he didn’t deserve this but now I’d started I couldn’t stop, it just spilled out and
